Bipolar brain scan

NEW YORK CITY (December 13, 2017)--The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation today announced the awarding of its Distinguished Investigator Grants valued at $1.7 million to 17 scientists, who are full professors or the equivalent, conducting innovative projects in diverse areas of neurobiological and behavioral research. Recipients of the $100,000, one-year grants are seeking new potential targets for understanding and treating a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders that affect one in five people, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, schizophrenia, and psychosis. Recipients of the 2017 Distinguished Investigator Grants were selected by the Foundation's Scientific Council, which is composed of 176 leading experts across disciplines in brain and behavior research, including two Nobel Laureates; two former directors of the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as the current director; four recipients of the National Medal of Science; … [Read more...] about Brain & Behavior Research Foundation awards distinguished investigator grants

By Dick James, Senior Technology Analyst, ChipworksIn the second week of December, the good and the great of the electron device world will make their usual pilgrimage to Washington D.C. for the 2015 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting. To quote the conference website front page, IEDM is “is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation.”That’s a pretty broad range of topics, but from my perspective at Chipworks, focused on the analysis of chips that have made it to production, it’s the … [Read more...] about A Look Ahead at IEDM 2015

Psychiatrists make life-altering decisions on the basis of a subjective assessment of a set of symptoms. But many freely admit they have far too little information to answer some critical questions: Is the patient suffering from severe depression, or is this a case of bipolar disorder that hasn't fully manifested itself yet? Will this schizophrenic patient respond to this drug? Draw the wrong conclusions about a depressed patient and the treatment may send him careening into mania. Make the wrong assessment of a schizophrenic person and you may give him an ineffective drug whose side effects could kill him. "I make these decisions every day," says Dr. Gary Hasey, associate professor of psychiatry at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., Canada. "If you make an error, you stand a good chance of making things worse." Today's method of choosing treatment—essentially an informed version of trial and error—costs an extra US $8500 per patient per year for the most … [Read more...] about The Psychiatrist in the Machine

This article was a feature story in Technology Review’s December 2005/January 2006 print issue. It has been divided into three parts for presentation online. This is part 3; part 1 appeared on Monday, January 23, and part 2 on Tuesday, January 24. Parts 1 and 2 discussed the work of John Port, a neuroradiologist at the Mayo Clinic who is using MRI to explore the parts of the brain that may be involved in bipolar disorder. Diagnosing Development The techniques Port is studying, if they prove successful, will be used in diagnosing people already showing signs of mental illness. But what about others who are predisposed to problems but have not yet begun to exhibit symptoms? Can the MRI technology help to find these people so that they can be helped before symptoms appear? At Columbia, Peterson is trying to answer that question. He and collaborators are among the first to scan the brains of premature infants – sometimes within days of their birth. The … [Read more...] about Inside the Premature Brain

This article – a feature story in Technology Review’s December 2005/January 2006 print issue – has been divided into three parts for presentation online. This is part 1; part 2 will appear on Tuesday, January 24, and part 3 on Wednesday, January 25. When Bradley Peterson, a psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, offered to scan my brain with a magnetic resonance imager the size of a small Airstream trailer, I immediately said yes. I spent 10 minutes filling out a page-long checklist (I lied on the question asking whether I was claustrophobic) and another few minutes emptying my pockets and getting rid of keys, wristwatch, and pen, which could become missiles inside the MRI’s potent magnetic field.I lay down on a narrow pallet that slid into the machine like a drawer in a morgue. The machine groaned and clanged as it peered inside my skull, then fell silent. With a gentle whir, the pallet slid out, and I relaxed. In about the time it … [Read more...] about Finding Bipolar Disorder with MRI

This article was a feature story in Technology Review’s December 2005/January 2006 print issue. It has been divided into three parts for presentation online. This is part 2; part 1 appeared on Monday, January 23, and part 3 will appear on Wednesday, January 25. Part 1 discussed the work of John Port, a neuroradiologist at the Mayo Clinic who is using MRI to explore the parts of the brain that may be involved in bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depression.”I’m dedicating the rest of my career to coming up with an imaging test that will help psychiatrists diagnose” bipolar disorder and other illnesses, Port told Technology Review. Port is one of many researchers now experimenting with MRI spectroscopy, in which software produces an image of the brain based on a spectroscopic scan. The image is made up of individual data points called voxels, cubes analogous to the pixels in a 2-D computer image. Each corresponds to a volume about the size of a … [Read more...] about The Chemical Fingerprints of Mental Illness

When Bradley Peterson, a psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, offered to scan my brain with a magnetic resonance imager the size of a small Airstream trailer, I immediately said yes. I spent 10 minutes filling out a page-long checklist (I lied on the question asking whether I was claustrophobic) and another few minutes emptying my pockets and getting rid of keys, wristwatch, and pen, which could become missiles inside the MRI’s potent magnetic field. I lay down on a narrow pallet that slid into the machine like a drawer in a morgue. The machine groaned and clanged as it peered inside my skull, then fell silent. With a gentle whir, the pallet slid out, and I relaxed. In about the time it takes to burn a few CDs on my laptop, Peterson was leaning over a screen, showing me a detailed black-and-white image of my brain.Brain scans like the one I had are now routine, used for everything from detecting signs of stroke to searching out suspected tumors. But researchers … [Read more...] about MRI: A Window on the Brain

Siemens has developed a prototype brain-imaging machine that can perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) simultaneously. This will save patients in clinical trials time and allow researchers to make more-accurate correlations between activity at different regions of the brain and at the cellular level. The device is the first to combine MRI, which gives information about the structure of the brain and about blood flow to brain regions, with PET, which allows researchers to monitor metabolic activity at the cellular level. The combined imaging method may help research into the basis of Alzheimer’s disease and provide a more accurate picture of drugs’ effects on the brain. Currently, researchers must perform MRI and PET scans sequentially. “Each device only looks at part of the picture,” says Doug Darrow, director of operations for molecular imaging at Siemens. When combining the images from MRI and PET scans, researchers … [Read more...] about A Better Picture of the Brain

Disease Research Fiber pathways in the brain are altered in schizophrenia, a mental illness in which patients may experience hallucinations, psychosis and depression. (Courtesy of Paul Thompson, Neda Jahanshad and Conor Corbin, USC Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute) Some 40 years since CT scans first revealed abnormalities in the brains of schizophrenia patients, international scientists say the disorder is a systemic disruption to the brain’s entire communication system.The study, published in the Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry on Oct. 17, sets the stage for future research on the debilitating mental illness that, according to the World Health Organization, affects more than 21 million people worldwide.It is the largest analysis of “white matter” (fatty brain tissue enabling neurons to talk to each other) differences in a psychiatric disorder to date and was made possible by a federal grant to … [Read more...] about Study: Schizophrenia Disrupts the Brain’s Entire Communication System